by Kevin Reilly
The ephemeral joy of a single beautiful
day
is followed by the sadness of 36,000
years.
May the divine coffin, my son,
be your desire in affliction!
Such is the lot of humanity.9
Shortly after this was written, another earthquake destroyed Ugarit, and it was never rebuilt. At about the same time, the once powerful Hittite Empire also disappeared.
In many cases, earthquakes were the last indignities suffered by the cities of the Bronze Age. When the earth shook well-placed stones into their final resting place, most of these cities had long since lost their vitality and their people. Disease, sometimes plague, had reduced their numbers and their capacity to endure. Crops had failed and animals died; famine had set up the weakened survivors for disease. The crisis of late Bronze Age empires was broad based, especially in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Like a hot desert wind blown into an expanding balloon, chariots had stretched the capacity of Bronze Age empires. But the resource base that was the flesh and blood of these empires was still agricultural, and the increasing wealth needed to sustain the rulers, aristocracy, army, and officials was drawn from the same tax base. The result was an eventual breakdown that was systemic. Farmers left the land they could no longer afford to work. Cities became overburdened and underfed, and people abandoned them. Everywhere, people were displaced and on the move. City and countryside were threatened by pirates, bandits, and what contemporary Egyptian inscriptions called a horde of looting vandals. Looking back, slightly less than 3,000 years ago, a later Assyrian king recalled, “I brought back the exhausted people of Assyria who had abandoned their cities and houses in the face of want, hunger, and famine, and had gone up to other lands.”10 One Egyptian illustration of the period shows refugees carrying their children and belongings on oxen-drawn carts with solid wooden discs for wheels—a far cry from the wildfire of horses and spoke-wheeled chariots that once froze hearts in fear.
Of course, not all ancient states collapsed. Bronze Age Shang China was overrun but without a long crisis. Egypt was conquered, but, like China, elements of the old culture continued into a new age.
In the Americas, where there was no pastoral challenge or wide use of metals,11 some ancient state societies collapsed early, most notably the Mayan and pre-Aztec Mexican. The Inca, by 1500 CE the last of a long series of state societies in the Andes, was wracked by a civil war that aided Spanish conquest. The Aztecs were conquered by a much later horse culture, one that progressed from chariots to iron armored cavalry to gunpowder. But that is a later story.
More to the point, perhaps, the urban revolution was permanent. Today on the island where the Aztecs chose to create their city stands the capital city of modern Mexico. In the central square of Mexico City on the site of the ancient Aztec pyramid Major Temple stands the Roman Catholic Cathedral, constructed in part with stones from the Aztec pyramid.
Iron Age Eurasia
Not all cities were permanent, but the urban revolution itself was permanent. One of the features that gave it permanence was the capacity of urban institutions to maintain continuity yet change, even when change involved substantial transformation. One of the more profound transformations in the second and third millennium of urban societies in Eurasia was the substitution of iron for bronze as the material for tools and weapons.
Iron versus Bronze
Even before there were cities, some people had learned to work soft metals like gold and copper, but we date the urban revolution, or Bronze Age, with the use of the harder metal formed by smelting a combination of tin and copper. Bronze was an expensive alloy, however, since tin and copper were not widely available in the same areas. Consequently, bronze was accessible only to a wealthy few.12 It was a fitting adornment for the limited aristocracy of early civilization. In Shang China, bronze was intentionally barred from peasants lest they become too powerful.
By 1000 BCE, many ancient civilizations had discovered iron, which was more abundant in nature, easier to shape, stronger, and less brittle than bronze. The technique of smelting or heating iron to be shaped and then hardened originated in the Hittite Empire in what is today northern Turkey and the Caucasus Mountains between 1900 and 1500 BCE. From there, ironworking spread throughout Eurasia and North Africa, although there may have been additional discoveries.13 The technique seems to have been discovered independently, for example, around the Great Lakes of Central Africa (modern Rwanda) about 1000 BCE and in the area of Cameroon in West Africa about 800 BCE.14 From these centers, ironworking spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, the Bantu-speaking people of the Cameroon region migrated throughout Africa over the past 2,000 years, spreading their skills, their superior iron tools and weapons, their languages, and their genes.
Iron tools and weapons were stronger and sharper than bronze. Iron plows turned over harder soils, enabling farmers to expand their fields and the size of their harvests. The main advantage of iron, however, was that it was more widely available in nature and therefore much cheaper than bronze. It could supply a far greater number of farmers and soldiers, increasing their yields and giving commoners more leverage in the new massed infantries that replaced Bronze Age charioteers. If bronze was the fitting adornment of an aristocratic age, iron was the metal of the common person.15
The Iron Age did not abolish social classes. In fact, as empires grew ever larger, emperors and ruling classes enriched themselves from a greater world of plunder and taxation. During the first millennium BCE, the gap between the very rich and the very poor increased, and slavery became more pervasive. The long-term impact of iron was as double-edged as its finest blades. Iron enabled empires to grow by fielding larger armies, but it also increased the raw power of common people, who had access to iron weapons and tools.
New Forms of Inclusiveness:
Words and God for All
Iron as Metaphor . During the first millennium BCE, iron became available to people throughout Eurasia and Africa, but in the area of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, the variety of civilizations and the degree of interaction among them stimulated a series of innovations that were far more important than the use of a new metal. Yet if we think of the Iron Age as a period in which people became both more powerful and also part of a larger political world, then iron is at least an apt metaphor. It suggests not only the iron tools of farmers and weapons of soldiers but also a society in which many people participated in new ways.
The new participatory society took many forms. The development of a phonetic alphabet in the Middle East made writing and reading easier, but even those who could not read participated in public religious and cultural activities to a greater degree than before. The Iron Age was the period in which the great global religious traditions were born and prospered. These traditions were based on books: holy books and sacred words, even for those who could not read them.
The Iron Age cultivated independent populations and institutions to a far greater extent than Bronze Age societies. Merchants and manufacturers were more numerous, prosperous, and powerful. While state-supported priests still played an important role in some societies, so did new groups of more independent cultural leaders: missionaries, educators, and public intellectuals. Indeed, the Iron Age societies of the Eurasian crossroads created the idea and reality of “the public”: public space, the republic, and, in some societies, civic identity and citizenship. Not incidentally, the first democracy developed in Iron Age Greece. In addition, not incidentally, it developed in the Greek Empire, where citizens enjoyed the labor of slaves.
The eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East after 1000 BCE constituted a patchwork of states of different sizes. The largest power by far was the Assyrian Empire, which had re-created itself after the upheavals at the end of the Bronze Age. This New Assyrian Empire (934-610 BCE) controlled the entire Tigris and Euphrates valley, southeastern Turkey, and the eastern Mediterranean coast. It was the larges
t, richest, and most powerful empire of this pivotal region or any other up to this time. Yet the powerful Assyrians sometimes allowed a certain degree of independence to the city-states and kingdoms on the Mediterranean coast. Among these were the Phoenician cities, most of which paid tribute to Assyria between 877 and 635 BCE, and the Hebrew states of Judah and Israel.
The Invention of the Alphabet . The Phoenicians are remembered for the Phoenician, or Phonetic alphabet, which is the system of symbols for sounds that is the basis of our 26 letters. The idea of using symbols for sounds (which are relatively few) as opposed to symbols for things and ideas (which are almost infinite) was not unknown before the Phoenicians invented the alphabet. Egyptologists recently discovered earlier alphabetic writing in Egypt’s Western Desert dating from about 2000 BCE, but that system never challenged the established Egyptian hieroglyphs. Still, Egyptian writing included some symbols for sounds, as did Sumerian and Akkadian, the languages of ancient Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, a writing code that used only symbols for sounds was a significant departure. It meant that anything could be written with about a couple dozen symbols for sounds, in any language, and with very little training. The Phoenician alphabet was so useful that it was adopted by people who spoke Aramaic, the most widely spoken language of the Middle East until the spread of Arabic in the seventh century AD, and by speakers of Greek, Etruscan, and Latin, which became the root of many European languages.
“T” Is for Trade . Why would a system of city-states, like Phoenicia, rather than a great empire, like Assyria, invent a system that made writing accessible to more people? We have only to ask the question to know the answer. In great empires, written communication was the secret preserve of the priests or scribes. An Egyptian priest or a Chinese scholar had to learn 50,000 symbols, knowledge that one did not share lightly. But the cities of the eastern Mediterranean coast had a different agenda. The Phoenician agenda was trade, and its trading partners ranged far and wide. The biblical poet Ezekiel praised the Phoenician city of Tyre for its wide range of trading partners:
Tarsus was a source of your commerce, from its abundant resources offering silver and iron, tin and lead as your staple wares. Cities of Turkey offered you slaves and vessels of bronze. Nomads offered you horses, mares, and mules. The people of the islands, like Rhodes, traded ivory and ebony [from Africa].
Ezekiel continues with a long list of Tyre’s numerous imports and trading partners: wine and wool from Edom (modern Jordan); wheat, oil, and balsam from Israel and Judah; cloth from Damascus; lambs and goats from Arabia; spices and precious stones from Sheba (Yemen); and “gorgeous stuffs, violet cloths and brocades from Ashur [Assyria] and Media [Iran].”16
Trade was the lifeblood of Phoenician city states like Tyre. Its trading operations were organized by merchant companies that were independent of local rulers, though even the kings of Assyria were sometimes prominent investors. The need of Assyrian kings for the products and profits of these city-states also ensured their relative independence. Like modern Hong Kong for China, Tyre and the other Phoenician cities were valuable to Assyria even when independent.
Monotheism . Monotheism, the idea of one God, emerged from the same network of competing states, each committed to its own god but each aware that its enemies did the same. In that combination of global awareness and local loyalty, some people came to believe that their own god was the only god.
Bronze Age states like Uruk and Egypt had many gods. Political loyalty had little to do with worship. The temples of ancient Mesopotamian cities were politically and economically important, but only the priests ever entered them. Egyptian kings had to be obeyed and gods placated but not because there was an intense bond between god and people.
The Hebrew Bible tells of the development of such a bond between the people of Israel and their god, Yahweh. He is a jealous god, he tells them, and abhors their worship of other gods. But in return for their loyalty, Yahweh battles their enemies. Around 900 BCE, David, the warrior king, conquered neighboring states with the aid of Yahweh. A typical account of David’s battles against the Philistines tells how Yahweh not only encouraged, indeed commanded, the attack but even suggested a winning battle plan: “Do not go straight up, but circle around behind them and attack them in front of the balsam trees” (2 Samuel 5:23). The ancient Hebrews believed that God acted on behalf of his people, but in a monarchy the king was God’s anointed. When the Bible tells of King David’s Judean war against the northern kingdom of Israel, his armies massacring the relatives of his predecessor, King Saul, the moral of the story is that Yahweh serves his people even when he seems to abandon them. Many of the biblical books of prophecy take on the explicit task of accounting for the defeat of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 721 BCE and of the southern kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. Nothing, not even the people’s defeat, happens without the consent of their god. The prophets find a ready explanation in the failure of Yahweh’s people to live up to their responsibilities.
Gods at War . Similar ideas developed on the other side of these battlefields. An Assyrian history tells of an occasion when King Ashurbanipal chose to attend a festival for the goddess Ishtar in her city Arbella rather than lead his forces in battle. In Arbella, he learns that the Elamites have attacked his troops, and he pleads for help from Ishtar. The goddess appears before him: “her face fire flamed, with raging anger; she marched forth against Teumman, the king of Elam,”17 telling Ashur-banipal to remain, drink her beer, and praise her divinity. She will take care of the rest.
Before battles, on both sides, militant kings invoked their gods, prophets foretold the outcome, and gods saved or abandoned their people. In most cases, people assumed that their own gods were more effective among their own people than among others, and wars became a test of whose god was more powerful. Rarely did people expect conquered foreigners to switch loyalties to the winning god.
At some point, however, the people of Israel believed that Yahweh was not only their god but also the only god that people anywhere should worship. The Hebrew Bible is full of stories of backsliders among Yah-weh’s people, tempted by Baal, the god of the neighboring Cananites, or the great goddess Asherah. The transition to monotheism must have been gradual and long incomplete.
What could have prompted the spread of monotheism—such a departure from the traditional idea of competing states under competing warlike gods? Ironically, it was probably not military success since the greatest military victories were achieved under David and his son Solomon in a brief 40 years around 900 BCE. After that, Yahweh’s people suffered a series of reversals, including the split between Judah and Israel, civil war, and the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians and of Judah by the Babylonians.
The Rivers of Babylon . Strangely, defeat may have been more of a spur to monotheism than victory. It was common practice in this period for victorious empires to resettle conquered people, often exchanging populations to keep them divided. The Assyrians and Babylonians were masters of this tactic and spread the people of Israel and Judah far and wide. Yahweh worship, like that of Ishtar and other deities, had been very much based on location. Solomon built a temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem (albeit with Phoenician workers and artisans from Tyre) that became the focal point of the religion. Devastated by exile, the Judeans who were taken captive to Babylon asked how they could worship away from their temple, in a strange land:
By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down, yea, we wept,
When we remembered Zion. . . .
How shall we sing the Lord’s song In a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee,
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my
mouth; (Psalms 137)
In fact, the experience of exile did much to turn a national religion into a universal one. Away from Jerusalem, Yahweh’s reach extended far beyond temple priests and local
concerns. A god who was everywhere required neither image nor temple. Daniel received the Lord’s protection far away in a lion’s den in Babylon, a city that provided him a global vantage point on God’s universal plan. In exile, refugees from Jerusalem felt more acutely the need to keep their traditions alive. As a consequence, much of what became the Hebrew Bible was remembered and put to writing by and for generations raised in exile.
When Cyrus, king of Persia, conquered Babylon and restored the Jews to Jerusalem, it was clear to the prophet Isaiah that the god of Abraham, the creator of the world, and the god of Cyrus and his vast empire must be all one and the same:
This is what the LORD says—
your Redeemer, who formed you in
the womb:
I am the LORD,
who has made all things,
who alone stretched out the heavens,
who spread out the earth by myself,
25who foils the signs of false prophets
and makes fools of diviners,
who overthrows the learning of the wise
and turns it into nonsense,
26 who carries out the words of his
servants
and fulfills the predictions of his
messengers,
who says of Jerusalem, “It shall be
inhabited,”
of the towns of Judah, “They shall be
rebuilt,”
and of their ruins, “I will restore them,”
